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6.1.1. Manual Pages
Manual pages, while relatively terse in style, contain a great deal of essential information. To view a manual page, simply type man manual-page. The manual page usually coincides with the command name. For example, to learn about the possible options for the cp command, you would type man cp at the command prompt.
Man pages not only document programs accessible from the command line, but also configuration files, system calls, C library functions, and so forth. Sometimes names can collide. For example,
the shell’s read command has the same name as the read system call. This is why manual pages are organized in the following numbered sections:
1. Commands that can be executed from the command line
2. System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3. Library functions (provided by system libraries)
4. Devices (on Unix-like systems, these are special files, usually placed in the /dev/ directory)
5. Configuration files (formats and conventions)
6. Games
7. Sets of macros and standards
8. System administration commands
9. Kernel routines
You can specify the section of the manual page that you are looking for: to view the documentation for the read system call, you would type man 2 read. When no section is explicitly specified, the first section that has a manual page with the requested name will be shown. Thus, man shadow returns shadow(5) because there are no manual pages for shadow in sections 1–4.
Of course, if you do not know the names of the commands, the manual is not going to be of much use to you. Enter the apropos command, which searches manual pages (or more specifically their short descriptions) for any keywords that you provide. The apropos command then returns a list of manual pages whose summary mentions the requested keywords along with the one-line summary from the manual page. If you choose your keywords well, you will find the name of the command that you need.
Example 6.1 Finding cp with apropos
$ apropos ”copy file”
cp (1) - copy files and directories
cpio (1) - copy files to and from archives
gvfs-copy (1) - Copy files
gvfs-move (1) - Copy files
hcopy (1) - copy files from or to an HFS volume install (1) - copy files and set attributes ntfscp (8) - copy file to an NTFS volume.
$ apropos ”copy file”
cp (1) - copy files and directories
cpio (1) - copy files to and from archives
gvfs-copy (1) - Copy files
gvfs-move (1) - Copy files
hcopy (1) - copy files from or to an HFS volume install (1) - copy files and set attributes ntfscp (8) - copy file to an NTFS volume.
Browsing Documentation Many manual pages have a “See Also” section, usually near the end of the document, by Following Links which refers to other manual pages relevant to similar commands, or to external doc- umentation. You can use this section to find relevant documentation even when the
first choice is not optimal.
Browsing Documentation Many manual pages have a “See Also” section, usually near the end of the document, by Following Links which refers to other manual pages relevant to similar commands, or to external doc- umentation. You can use this section to find relevant documentation even when the
first choice is not optimal.
In addition to man, you can use konqueror (in KDE) and yelp (in GNOME) to search man pages as well.